Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [34]
They had brought their child home to a plain three-bedroom brick bungalow of the type referred to as a “starter house” for young married couples. Its distinguishing characteristics were those left by the previous owners. Jeremy and Harriet had never had time to redecorate it; as a result, their bedroom was covered with flocked jungle-orange wallpaper, the paint in Harriet’s sewing room was oyster-gray, and the child’s room had been painted blue, with two planets and four constellations mapped out on the ceiling with phosphorus dots and circles. At the time, their child was too little to notice such things: she gurgled at the trees outside and at the birds that sang in the shrubbery below her windowsill.
This child, Ellen, had been born after many difficulties. Harriet had had a series of ovarian cysts. She ovulated irregularly and only when provoked by certain powerful hormonal medications that left her so forgetful that she had to draw up hourly schedules for the day’s tasks. She had the scars to prove that surgical procedures had been used to remove her enlarged ovaries piece by piece. The baby had been in a troublesome position, and Harriet had endured sixteen hours of labor, during which time she thrashed and groaned. Jeremy watched her lying in the hospital gown, his hands pressed against her lower back, while her breathing grew louder, hoarse and rhythmical. Their Lamaze lessons proved to be useless. The lights glared overhead in the prep room and could not be dimmed. In its labors her body heaved as if her reproductive system were choking in its efforts to expel the child. Her obstetrician was out of town on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, so the delivery was finally performed by a resident, a young woman who had a short hairdo and whose purple fingernail polish was visible through her surgical gloves.
The oyster-gray paint and the phosphorus planets in the house suited Ellen, who, when she was old enough to toddle, would point at the stars on the ceiling and wave at them. At this time she could not pronounce her own name and referred to herself as “Ebbo” or, mysteriously, as “Purl.” On a spring morning she climbed from the crib onto the windowsill in pursuit of a chickadee singing outside. Cheered by the sun, Harriet had left the window open to let the breeze in. Ellen pushed herself past the sill and managed to tumble out, breaking the screen. She landed on a soft newly tilled flower bed next to a bush. When Harriet found her, she was tugging at flower shoots and looking pleased with herself. She said, “Purl drop.” She shrugged her right shoulder and smiled.
They latched the screen onto a stronger frame and rushed around the house looking for hazards. They installed a lock on the basement door so she wouldn’t tumble downstairs, and fastened shut the kitchen sink’s lower cabinet so she wouldn’t eat the dishwasher detergent. She lived one day past her third Christmas, when for the first time she knew what a Christmas tree was and could look forward to it with dazed anticipation. On Christmas Day she was buried up to her waist in presents: a knee-high table complete with cups and saucers, finger puppets, a plastic phonograph, a stuffed brown bear that made wheezing sounds, a Swiss music box, a windup train that went around in a small circle, a yellow toy police car with a lady cop inside, and, in her stocking, pieces of candy, gum, a comb, and a red rubber ball her mother had bought at Kiddie Land for twenty-five cents.
On December 26, Jeremy and Harriet were slumped in the basement, watching Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street for the eighth or ninth time, while Ellen played upstairs in her room. They went through three commercial breaks before Harriet decided to check on her. She hadn’t been worried because she could hear the phonograph playing a Sesame Street record. Harriet went down the hallway and turned the corner into Ellen’s room. Her daughter was lying on the floor, on her side, her skin blue. She wasn’t breathing. On her forehead was blood next to a bright cut. Harriet